On February 11, 1917, Annie Oakley exhibited her skills as a markswoman in Pinehurst.
Born Phoebe Ann Moses in Ohio in 1860, Oakley first demonstrated that she was skilled with a gun while hunting game as a teenager. She was discovered after defeating Frank Butler, a well-known sharpshooter, in an exhibition in Cincinnati in 1876, and married Butler soon thereafter.
On February 10, 1937, Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and pianist Roberta Flack was born in Black Mountain.
On February 10, 1854, African American orator and teacher, Joseph C. Price was born in Elizabeth City. In 1863 his family moved to New Bern where he was enrolled in St. Andrew’s School. Price, though late in beginning his formal education, made exceptional progress. After completing his own education, he taught in Wilson, becoming the principal at a school there in 1871, but within a few years he returned to school to prepare for the ministry in the A.M.E. Zion Church.
Jim Beatty. Image from UNC Athletics.
On February 10, 1962, Jim Beatty became the first man to run the mile indoors in under four minutes.
On February 9, 1956, basketball legend Phil Ford was born in Kannapolis.
Ford was raised in Rocky Mount, where he graduated from high school in 1974.
As a point guard at UNC-Chapel Hill, he led the basketball team to four NCAA tournaments. Ford’s accolades during his college career were many. In 1978, he capped off his senior year by winning the coveted John R. Wooden Award, given annually to the country’s most outstanding college basketball player.
He graduated that year with a degree in business administration.
On February 8, 1944, Westray Battle Boyce was promoted to lieutenant colonel and received the Legion of Merit. Few North Carolina men, and no Tar Heel women, had a more distinguished service record in World War II than Colonel Westray Battle Boyce. In August 1942 she entered training for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which became a part of the Army in September 1943 when the name was changed to the Women’s Army Corps (WACs).
On February 8, 1898, Warren Coleman and his associates laid the cornerstone for the nation’s first Black-owned cotton mill in Concord.
Congressman George H. White, himself a civil rights pioneer, was the main speaker at the event. The company represented the first major cooperative effort by North Carolina’s African American businessmen.
On February 8, 1949, North Carolina’s Merci Train car, filled with gifts of gratitude from French citizens, arrived in Raleigh. The French train, with 49 cars—one for each state at the time, plus one for Washington, D. C. and the territory of Hawaii to share—was sent in response to the American Friendship Train. That train was sent to France by the United States the previous year, and consisted of 700 boxcars filled with relief supplies.
On February 8, 1948, designer Alexander Julian was born in Chapel Hill.
Julian’s father owned a menswear boutique, Julian’s, downtown near the UNC campus. Growing up visiting and later working in the store, young Julian took a natural career path.
On February 7, 1847, New Hanover County native Capt. John Henry King Burgwin died of a wound he received while leading an assault during the Taos Revolt, an insurrection of Mexicans and their Pueblo Indian allies against the American occupation of what is now New Mexico.